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1829–2014
The town is the road, at four dates. The Michigan Road was Indiana's first great north–south highway, built with the proceeds of the road-land grant of the 1826 treaty (the land section carries the grant): surveyed 1829, passable by 1834, "completed" in 1837, at a cost of $242,000 (Indiana Historical Bureau marker text), opened a hundred feet wide and grubbed thirty feet in the centre. Through Lakeville the old road is Michigan Street, and its hundred-foot right-of-way is still legible in the town's width. When the road from South Bend to Plymouth became a plank road, Howard records, "an infusion of new life for a time gave an air of prosperity to the little hamlet, and several additions were platted to the town; but after a few years the plank road became out of repair and the old planks were taken up and the toll houses removed." The plank road's own course is settled in this build's corridors record: the South Bend and Plymouth Plank Road Company — its organization bill passed by 18 July 1851, about ten miles of plank built in 1851–52, the road completed most of the way to Plymouth in 1852, and the line abandoned before the Civil War; Howard gives no dates and is exhausted for them (assembly conform, DELTA-LK5-5). The road in St. Joseph County also carried the Dixie Highway routing, a pointer the highways pass digs. In October 1926 the through route was designated U.S. 31. It stayed U.S. 31 through the town until the present century: on 27 August 2014 the new U.S. 31 freeway from Plymouth to South Bend was officially opened (INDOT), a portion of it dedicated as the Richard W. Mangus Memorial Highway — and the freeway bypasses Lakeville to the EAST, about a mile from downtown, dropping the old road's traffic from 27,000 vehicles a day to 5,400 (EPA's Cool & Connected profile of the town). The old route through town became State Road 931, the number the town's own documents now use. This build's framing brief presumed the bypass ran west of town; no record reached carries a western bypass, two carriers state the eastern one expressly, and the correction is printed here and in the note so the error does not travel.